1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a point of sale display device including an open-faced product shipping container or plurality of like containers on a shelf in order to provide customer access to the products within the container or containers.
2. Description of Related Art
In displaying products at a point of sale location it is known for merchants to take a shipping container such as a cardboard box which holds a plurality of individual products, remove the top lid or cut off a top portion to provide an open face on the box, and then place the box on a shelf for access by customers. The box is usually placed on a shelf with its open face vertically disposed toward the customer to make product access more convenient. The box is free to shift inwardly, outwardly and sideways on the shelf. In removing products from the box the customer can inadvertently shift the box outwardly, causing it to fall off the shelf, or move the box laterally, which may cause it to contact and dislodge an adjacent box or boxes. A falling box offers potential for injury and the impact of the fall may result in damage to the products in the box.
In order to minimize such problems many merchants do not place an open-faced shipping box directly on a shelf. Most often the products are removed from their shipping box and stacked individually or placed in product holding bins on shelves. Either of these alternatives is more labor intensive and therefore more costly than simply placing open-faced shipping containers with the products therein directly onto shelves.
Known product displays stack open-faced containers at a point of purchase. It is, for example, known from U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,849,659 and 4,708,240, to provide display devices for supporting open-faced containers in vertically stacked, stepped-back relation to each other. The display supports of these prior patents are not adapted for removably securing individual open-faced product shipping containers on a standard horizontal shelf.